USB 2.0 Hi-speed Flash drive review

A Flash drive RAID-0 array?

Before we wrap up this review with our summary and conclusion, we thought it
might be fun to get a little geeky and create a RAID-0 array with two of
the Flash drives. Since we did not have two identical drives to create our RAID
array, we decided to use two devices with the most similar read/write
characteristics. In this case, we decided to utilize the SimpleTech Bonzai
Xpress and the Verbatim Store 'n' Go. To accomplish this feat, we used a
PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz and OS X's Disk Utility program. We inserted a drive in
each USB slot and fired up the Disk Utility program. Clicking on the "RAID"
button, we were prompted to drag multiple drives into the box to form a
software based RAID array. After selecting RAID-0 (Striping) and the MacOS Extended
(Journaling) filesystem, the system quickly created a 500MB RAID-0 volume as
shown in the screen shot below.

As most of you know, a RAID-0 array merges two drives into one big drive and
doubles the speed of the drive at the same time (at the expense of having twice
the statistical likelihood of complete drive failure.) So how does it perform? See for yourself:

As shown in the benchmarks taken with QuickBench, the RAID-0 array's "read
performance" is no better than any other drive up to 32KB file sizes. When the
benchmark test hits the 64KB file size, the Iomega pulls out in front of the
other single drives. At the same time, the "Read Performance" on the RAID array virtually doubles in
throughput and continues up to 14MB/sec easily surpassing the Iomega drive!
The 32KB performance threshold is likely due to the RAID array having a stripe size of
32KB.

The "Write
Performance" of the RAID array was not nearly as nice, but still
impressive. As we covered earlier,
the majority of these drives do not perform very well when it comes to writing
small files. Unlike the read performance, the write performance marks between the
SimpleTech and Verbatim drives are not identical. Consequently, the RAID array did not fare well against the
Fujifilm drive until hitting the 1MB file size.

So how useful is this software RAID-0 array? Sadly, it turns out to be only
an exercise in geekery with marginal usefulness. While it is entirely possible to safely unmount the drive
by dragging the drive to the trash can, it is not possible to take the two Flash
drives and recreate the RAID array in another computer while the machine is on.
When plugging in the second drive to form the RAID array, the OS X very politely kernel
panics with the Multi-Language Screen Of Death (MLSOD) declaring that you
need to power off your machine. Interestingly enough, upon rebooting, OS X was
able to find both drives and recreate the software RAID array. Now, if all-out speed is what you
really need, a
portable Firewire/USB hard drive would be a much better option in almost any
scenario.